Whether you’re just starting out your career, or looking to make a move, it can be important to know what part of the country offers the best chance for your long term career prospects. And for a very common profession like Pharmacists, the regional differences can have a big impact on your salary and career options.

To help you make the best decision possible, we at Zippia wanted to look at the cities that offer pharmacists the most for their career. These are the cities across the US where pharmacists get paid well, relative to the cost of living, and jobs are plentiful.

So we did what we do best and dove into the numbers from the BLS to figure out which cities have the best opportunities for pharmacists.The result is this list of the best cities pharmacists:

So there you have it — Beckley is the best city when it comes to being a pharmacist.

And where should you consider avoiding if you’re a pharmacist? That would be Albany.

Read on to see how we completed our research on the best cities for pharmacists and for more on the top ten cities.

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How we determined the best cities to be a pharmacists?

Here at Zippia, we talk to a lot of people of all different backgrounds looking for jobs. Our research has concluded that there are two common things people want in a job:

Availability of jobs

Pay

So in order to find out the best cities for pharmacists in America we needed to figure out where the jobs are and how well pharmacists get paid. This led to the following criteria taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Employment Statistics for 2015:

Location quotient. A measure of how common a job is a given city.

Average annual salary.

Average annual salary for entry level work.

To make all the salary numbers more apples to apples across cities, we compared the salary data relative to the state’s cost of living.

This left us with enough data for 411 metro areas across the country. We then took the primary area of the metro and labeled that the ‘city’ for this analysis. So, for example, “Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA NECTA Division” became simply Boston.

In order to develop an overall ranking, we ranked each city for each criteria from 1 to 411 where 1 was the best.

We then averaged all the rankings for a city into a Job Score with the city having the lowest overall Job Score earning the distinction of being the best city for pharmacists in America.

So without further ado, let’s get into just what made each city so great for pharmacists.